The martyrs’ cross

In the sixteenth century, St Michael’s Church in Cornmarket and
the Bocardo gaol marked the northern boundary of the city, and the
south side of Broad Street was just a ditch outside the city wall.
It was on waste ground beyond that ditch (now the site of Broad
Street) that the three Protestant Martyrs were famously burnt at
the stake. Originally it was hoped to build the Martyrs’ Memorial
on this spot, but, as G. V. Cox in his Recollections of
Oxford says, “It had been found impracticable to get a site
in Broad Street, the actual scene of the martyrdom”. Instead the
event is commemorated by this cross set into the road and a plaque
in the wall of Balliol College, while the actual memorial (completed
in 1843) stands around the corner in St Giles. This cross was the
“gloomy and inauspicious” place that Jude chose to meet
Sue Brideshead in Jude the Obscure.

Who were the martyrs? In
1553 when the Roman Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne, Thomas
Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury), Nicholas Ridley
(Archbishop of London), and Hugh Latimer
(Bishop of Worcester) were summoned to appear before a commission
in the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford to be examined
for their alleged Protestant heresies. Unable to admit to a belief
in transubstantiation, they were all found guilty. Ridley and Latimer
were burnt at the stake on 16 October 1555. Archbishop Cranmer,
who had been given longer to appeal, was forced to watch, and wrote
a recantation. None the less he was taken from the Bocardo gaol
at the Northgate on 21 March 1556 and also burnt to death.

The records of the City of Oxford show that the Bailiffs
of the city petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury for the payment
of the expenses incurred in dealing with the three martyrs. Oxford
had looked after the former Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, well: his
expenses included the cost of wine, figs, oysters, veal, and almonds,
as well as his barber and laundry charges; but the last items on
this list were the hundred wood faggots and 50 furze faggots
that formed his living pyre….

It is not certain that this cross marks the precise
spot where the fires took place, but it is known that Cranmer watched
the burning of the others from the Bocardo prison in Cornmarket
(beside St Michael’s Church).